TL;DR: Mozilla is killing localization on Support Mozilla, overwriting articles written by humans with machine generated translations. Although Mozilla knows that their AI doesn’t localize or adhere to style guides, Mozilla is going live with it anyway. I thank locale leaders and localizers for their tireless efforts. Locale leaders seem to be obviated by AI, and Mozilla has nothing to say about it.
In all objectivity, this seems like the most rational thing to do.
Now that you can have good translation by AI, why would anyone want to waste their time on localization?
I see the bots are commenting on lemmy.
The main issue, and this is also mentioned in the blog post, is that the bot only does translation and not localisation.
The first is just taking the words from one language and changing to another.
The second is to actually make sure the text in the new language makes proper sense. Maybe the English article uses some analogy that does realy make sense in the new language. Localisation is to find some other suitable analogy to use instead, so that the point from the main article is kept, but it still makes sense.
I do some volunteer work on localizing for Welsh and some Spanish. AI translations are hot garbage still even for the larger languages like Spanish. You can get a general idea of the intent most of the time, but that’s about it. It’s nowhere near good enough to replace humans with yet, definitely not good enough to overwrite what they’ve already translated.
I’ve never seen any machine translation that I would consider anywhere near good.
deepl.com (text translation) has been useful to me
It is good, specially on mid size text. But it is not good enough. When text is long or too short, it gets lost and makes tons of context mistakes. It also tends to be unnatural for the target language preferring original language phrasing.